As Colorado policymakers grapple with how to control what has become a barely disguised effort to legalize marijuana, we think the state’s law enforcement community has come up with the best approach.

Broadly speaking, it would return the medical marijuana mess to the more sane situation we had before this year’s explosion of patients and dispensaries.

The current lack of regulation has created a vacuum, which can be a dangerous thing. All sorts of undesirable situations — and proposed remedies — have arisen.

The main tenets of the law enforcement approach, put forward by Attorney General John Suthers, would limit caregivers to five patients and impose tighter controls on physicians who recommend medical marijuana for patients.

It would require doctors recommending medical marijuana to be in good standing, and it would give the state health department the ability to sanction doctors who violate new rules. Under his approach, those who actually need medical marijuana could contact the health department to be put in touch with a provider.

We think it hews more closely to what voters approved in 2000 and is a far cleaner approach than that suggested by state Sen. Chris Romer, who has proposed a wide range of regulations that would legitimize and license dispensaries that weren’t even mentioned in the amendment passed by voters.

Though we appreciate Romer’s effort to gather input from interested parties, we think his approach creates a need for an immense bureaucratic response — licensure, regulation and tax collection. We are concerned it will devolve into the chaotic medical marijuana situation that exists in California, where policy makers are struggling to regulate dispensaries.

We hope Democratic lawmakers, who control both the state House and Senate, think hard about the intent of the original medical marijuana measure and the sentiments of their constituents before supporting the bill being pushed by Romer, a fellow Democrat.

Communities all over the state have imposed moratoriums and restrictive conditions on the proliferation of dispensaries. They’re making their feelings quite clear.

Gov. Bill Ritter, a career prosecutor, also should take a leadership role on the issue as his fellow Democrats shape how medical marijuana will be delivered in this state.

It’s one of the biggest issues of the upcoming legislative session, and we hope a bipartisan group of lawmakers will step forward to champion the Suthers’ position.

Or, quite frankly, voters should just legalize marijuana use, because that’s better than what we have now with people skirting the law to smoke pot.

Though voters approved medical marijuana in 2000, the problems didn’t begin until this year. The state Board of Health declined last summer to formalize patient limits for medical marijuana caregivers. It also failed to define what it meant to have “significant responsibility” for a patient. That abdication gave enterprising marijuana peddlers an opening, and a motivation for getting as many people as possible medically certified to use marijuana.

It’s time to nudge medical marijuana closer to what voters had in mind nine years ago when they approved the small-scale use of marijuana for desperately sick people.

There’s been way more than enough written about Donald Trump’s battle with kneeling football players — especially with a major crisis underway in Puerto Rico — but one thing really does bother me that’s been revealed during this brouhaha: the extent to which many Americans have accepted the anti-democratic and false equivalence of patriotism and the military.